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Ken Cloude, career BB/9: 3.4 (ie, power-pitcher-level)
Ken Cloude, lowest BB/9: 1.9, partial season, Age 27, 9th year of pro ball
Ken Cloude, 2nd-lowest BB/9: 3.2
Brian Sweeney, career BB/9: 2.6
Brian Sweeney, age in 2002: 28, 7th pro year
Greg Wooten’s last year: 2002, 7th pro year
Greg Wooten’s career K/9: 5.8
Kevin Hodges, last year: 2001, 11th pro year
Kevin Hodges, career K/9: 5.1
Kevin Hodges, career BB/9: 3.1
Andy Carraway, career BB/9: 1.7 (half of Cloude's, several standard devs away)
Andy Carraway, years as a pro: 3
You’re comparing the last years of AAAA players with many more years of experience who are getting by strictly on guile to a kid who has done this since he stepped onto a pro mound. Hitting and pitching are not analogous as far as age/level goes, but experience does matter.
If you wanna do that, then Taijuan Walker is roughly analogous to Rich Dorman.
Being a crafty career minor leaguer usually means you don’t have a weapon, this is true. He might be Mark DiFelice or he might be Doug Fister.
But Carraway is not one of the proven career minor leaguers that you used as comparisons.
His hits (when not at HD) are low, his Ks are high enough to survive a supposed drop when transitioning to the bigs, and his command is absolute. What we don’t know about him: whether he has the control of the zone the effective, as Fister does, and whether he has a weapon to use in the zone like Vargas does.
There are a couple of guys every year who come through AA with Carraway’s statline and most of them never amount to anything. I could say that about all pitchers, though. Chris Tillman is back for his FOURTH go-round in AAA. His 9 K/9 and amazing arm haven’t helped him make his mark in the bigs. 9k/9 is not a standard of success, it’s a hopeful sign. Same with Carraway’s control. Until we see it against highest-level competition all the tools are just guess-based. It’s easier to predict success for 9K/9, because in theory it speaks to a dominant weapon. Carraway’s path to success will be more subtle if he finds it, and isn’t as easy to predict.
I still see Carraway as a swingman. He could be more, or he could be less. He’s a couple of years off, regardless – plenty of time to see if he can refine his weapon.
~G